The Legendary Dickie Landry

Arts & Culture

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And how he helped shape twentieth century music.

Part of the joy of writing about culture is the formulation of theories about how one thing informs another, discovering how unlikely juxtapositions yield new cultures. The other part is watching those theories crumble under the weight of the marvelous, unexpected truth.

I experienced both of these upon meeting Dickie Landry, first on film and then in person. As a saxophonist in Louisiana music super-group Lil’ Band O’ Gold, Landry was profiled in the film The Promised Land. The filmmaker follows Landry around his loft apartment and pauses at a poster advertising “Philip Glass and Dickie Landry—Solos.” I was dumbstruck. Philip Glass’ brand of music—often categorized by the dodgy umbrella of minimalism—is arguably some of the most important music of the twentieth century, stripping melody down to its base components, replacing traditional musical development with trance-inducing repetitions.

I am an unabashed fan of this music, and was blown away when the film revealed that Landry had been a founding member of the Philip Glass Ensemble. I’ve always thought there was a similarity between the reeling nature of Cajun music and the grind of so-called minimalism, but I never expected there might be a formal link between the two, especially not through a musician that lived about an hour from here with that whole portion of his career going relatively unknown to Louisiana music fans. I needed to know how a guy from Cecelia made it to New York and possibly changed the course of contemporary art.

“I grew up in Cecilia and started singing the Latin Mass, Gregorian chant, at the age of six and my mother brought me up to the church to be the next pope or cardinal or whatever, and fortunately the choir was practicing, and I turned around and said ‘I want to do that,’ and my mother said ‘If that is going to make you happy, do that.’ So I basically sang from the ages six through thirteen, 365 days a year. At ten years old, I was beginning band at school. My brother was eight years older than I was. He played saxophone, and I figured if he could play saxophone, I could play it too. At the age of thirteen, I played my first professional gig with the band he was playing with, the Harry Greig Orchestra. I guess you would call it ballroom music.”

As he’s telling me this story, I glance around his loft. Large Rauschenberg posters intermingle with photographs like they do in the homes of arty people; the difference here is these posters are the real thing. Landry toured the world with the acclaimed painter as a part of his Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Initiative. One of the framed photographs is an iconic image of two dancers in a seated position against a white background from Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s landmark opera Einstein on the Beach, a piece on which Landry played. He was also the photographer.

“When I graduated from high school in 1956, this drummer I knew had gotten some money from some gas property he had and bought a ’56 Corvette. He said, ‘Your brother and my friend are both at Columbia, let’s go to New York.’ I was interested in jazz, so I said ‘Let’s go,’ and we jumped in the car and went straight to Birdland. Basically I went back to New York every year from 1957 to 1963.”

“In 1962, I decided I really wanted to learn to play the flute. I went to LSU, and the head of the music school gave me the name of a flute teacher in New York named Arthur Lora. I wrote him and he wrote back saying that if you are in New York, stop by and we’ll see what we can do. It was eighty dollars an hour, a lot of money in 1962. But I went, and when I started playing, he said, ‘I’ll take you on, but you have to forget everything you know about music. We are going to take one note at a time.’ I’m thinking ‘I’m here for six weeks—six lessons, six notes—this is not going to work.’ I was staying at a friend’s house in Yonkers, practicing fifteen to sixteen hours a day between the lessons. By the third lesson, he said to me, ‘You have no idea who I am, do you?’ It turns out that Lora was the longtime principle flute player for Arturo Toscanini.”